We have reached the point of information hyper-saturation. It can become quite a chore to find relevant content online, when there is so much other information competing for your attention. But by implementing attention profiling, it becomes possible to have the services and websites you visit begin to make suggestions for content that you might be interested in.

APML is a proposed standard that gives you greater control over your own attention data, and in principle will allow you to selectively record your attention profile - the sites you visit, the search terms that interest you most, the content you most commonly link to - and share it with your favorite websites and services.

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While APML stands up as its own standard, it is also possible to see it as part of a bigger picture.

As the web evolves we are seeing a great shift towards smart information filtering - the evolving notion of a "semantic web", but also, just as significantly, a move in the direction of expanding data portability.

Open standards make for an effective way of allowing data to freely flow from one web destination to another, rather than keeping different sets of data in closed silos and walled gardens. At the moment if I want to have a profile on MySpace and Facebook, for instance, I have to create them separately, and any information I enter on each remains locked into that particular destination.

Open standards and data portability are all about allowing me to take my information and use it across a number of services.